SOPA and PIPA

Phil Plait — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:00:49 +0000

By the time you read this, you have already heard or discovered that Mozilla, reddit, Wikipedia, and many others sites are going dark today to raise awareness about Congress’s highly regressive internet blocking legislation. The House’s version, SOPA, is making headlines, but the Senate version, PIPA, is pretty much the same.

I am not blacked out for two reasons. Since I am hosted on Discover’s site, I cannot take the whole thing down, and it would not be appropriate for me to ask. But also, simply blacking out raises awareness but doesn’t give information. I’m all about making sure people get good info, so below is a list of links where you’ll find why so many people hate this legislation so much.

- Google (!)

- reddit (they also have this page with many links to help you take action)

- Adam Savage at Popular Mechanics

- Forbes (though it’s clearly not correct to say SOPA is dead, and I no longer trust Obama will do as he says after signing the NDAA)

- Mashable

- Wil Wheaton

And I’ll note: I ...

The odds of successfully surviving an attack on an Imperial Star Destroyer are approximately…

Phil Plait — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 14:00:15 +0000

Never tell me the odds!

Yegads. I saw this while I was outside the other day; that’s a lenticular cloud, shaped by winds blowing over the Rocky Mountains. We see a lot of them around Boulder, but this one looked really familiar. I suddenly realized: it’s a ship from Star Wars!

I thought it looked a lot like Queen Amidala’s ship. But I couldn’t be sure, so I sent a note to my pal Bonnie Burton, aka BonnieGrrl, the proprietor of grrl.com, and major Star Wars dork. She concurred with my conclusion of the cloud looking like a Naboo Royal Starship (I was careful not to bias her by suggesting it; she mentioned it herself). And Bonnie should know: she literally wrote the book on Star Wars crafts!

Still, it looked like another ship from Star Wars, too… maybe even one that might be carrying Vader himself. If that’s the case, I know which cloud I could really use now!

Moisture and updrafts matter not. Look at me. Judge me by my convection do you? Hmm? Hmmm?

Related posts:

-

Another orbit? Why, you don’t look a rotation older than 4.56 billion years!

Phil Plait — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 12:59:38 +0000

In what is becoming an annual January tradition celebrating my laziness, I’m reposting this article about why astronomers are no fun at New Year’s parties. Well, they can be, but only until you actually say "Happy New Year!" to them, whereupon they’ll corner and lecture you about how to measure orbital periods. It’s amazing any astronomers reproduce. Anyway, here’s the article, which was a lot of fun to originally write, and even more fun to cut and paste here.]

Yay! It’s a new year!

But what does that mean, exactly?

The year, of course, is the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the Sun, right? Well, not exactly. It depends on what you mean by "year", and how you measure it. This takes a wee bit of explaining, so while the antacid is dissolving in your stomach to remedy last night’s excesses, sit back and let me tell you the tale of the year.

First, I will ignore a few things. For example, time zones. These were invented by a sadistic watchmaker, who only wanted to keep people in thrall of his devious plans. So for now, let’s just ignore them, and assume that for these purposes you spend a whole year ...

Nothing to do

Phil Plait — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:30:00 +0000

Sometimes, over the holidays, it’s easy to think there’s nothing to do. If you feel that way, Sci-ence! wants to have a word with you.

[Click to exnihiloenate.]

And why, yes, that comic does describe me as a child.

… and maybe as an adult, too.

Related posts:

- In which I disagree with cartoon Neil Tyson

Blastr: Invasion Earth!

Phil Plait — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:00:53 +0000

I watched "Battle: Los Angeles" recently, a movie about aliens invading the Earth. It wasn’t terrible, and it wasn’t great. It was watchable, and worked sufficiently well in lowering our supply of popcorn at Chez BA.

But like every alien invasion movie I see, there’s one small, really eensy-weensy problem: the reason they give for the invasion itself was dumb. [SPOILER] They came to steal our water? And use it for fuel? Say WHA?

Ignoring the silly idea of using water for fuel — that’s got physics exactly backwards, since you get energy out of combining oxygen and hydrogen to make water, and it takes energy to crack them apart — there’s an even bigger problem…

… which I won’t tell you here, because I go into all sorts of detail in my latest Blastr article, 6 Reasons Why Aliens Would NEVER Invade Earth. Mind you, I’m not talking about aliens just coming here to shoot the breeze, but aliens coming here to shoot us. It’s hard to think of a good reason they’d do so, and certainly the reasons given in pretty much every movie don’t make ...

Laying down the pulsar beat

Phil Plait — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:00:28 +0000

A few years back, when I was working on using NASA satellite data to create educational materials for kids, we had this idea of using the steady beats from pulsars in a song. Pulsars are the rapidly-spinning über-dense fantastically-magnetic collapsed cores of exploded stars. As they spin, they emit beams of matter and energy that sweep out into space much like a lighthouse beam, and we see a blip of light when that beam passes over us.

Some pulsars spin hundreds of times per second, some take several seconds to spin once. If you take that pulse of light and translate it into sound, you get a very steady thumping beat with very precise timing. So making it into a song is a natural thought.

But we certainly didn’t take it as far as the German band Reimhaus did, making a music video out of it! They used several pulsars for their song "Echoes, Silence, Pulses & Waves". So here’s the cosmic beat:

Pretty clever. Lots of other people have turned cosmic phenomena into sounds and music, including the Perseid meteor shower, the

Geek holiday gift ideas: Robot roll call!

Phil Plait — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 19:46:00 +0000

[NOTE: A lot of folks are posting geek holiday gift ideas, which is great! I have a few things I want to mention, so I'll be posting a few of mine as well this week. I have a bunch I'll put in one post later, but what follows here needed some pictures, so it goes in a post by itself. Enjoy!]

The other day I got an email from my friend, the appropriately-named Bob Goodman. He told me that another friend of his, Sarah Stocker, had co-founded this company called My Robot Nation — where you can design your own little toy robot model, and then the company will create it using a 3D printer! Would I be interested in checking it out?

Duh. Emails and introductions were exchanged, and Sarah — full disclosure here — sent me a coupon code so I could make my own little toy minion. I called down my 15-year-old proto-geek daughter, and the two of us sat in front of my computer, logged in to My Robot Nation, and started playing with the robot design web interface.

It was fun! ...

Naked I astronomy

Phil Plait — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:30:01 +0000

I have a billion things to do this weekend, but since today is conspiring to just be silly, I’ll just leave this here for you. Click it, and don’t forget to hover over the red button at the bottom.

P.S. That’s not my real tattoo, though Zach got the location correct.

Related posts:

-A new SMBC book! Plus, bonus me.
- I am interviewed by the Weinersmiths
- Putting the fun in funding
- Percy, Percy, me
- Science advisor of EEVVVIIILLLL

Schrödinger’s Caturday

Phil Plait — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 14:00:03 +0000

You see, this is why I didn’t do very well in my graduate quantum mechanics class.

I couldn’t think outside the box.

Alternate captions:

"On the other hand we really don’t know her momentum at all."

"Placebo control groups really aren’t appropriate for quantum experiments."

"How science will be done under a Rick Perry Presidency."

"This is what happens when you let Schrödinger’s dog run the experiment."

"My quantum trap finally succeeded for capturing a mewon."

Related posts:

- It’s Caturday? NONONONO.
- Caturday: the demon on the couch
- Caturday napping
- Caturday night’s all right for fighting: Part 2
- Big Caturday

Mesmerizing visualization of a geomagnetic storm

Phil Plait — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 19:00:45 +0000

When the Sun belches out an eructation of subatomic particles, they can travel across the solar system and interact with the Earth’s magnetic field. This can make our field ring like a bell, shaking the particles trapped within, and generating electromagnetic noise and signals across the radio spectrum. The CARISMA radio array can detect these emissions and learn about how the Sun’s and Earth’s fields interact.

That’s the science. But there’s art here, too: the Lighthouse agency commissioned artists to create digital artwork based on science, and one group, Semiconductor, used the CARISMA data to do so. Based on the data, they translated the radio waves (which are like the light we see, but less energetic) and converted them to sound. This has been done many times before, but what’s cool is that they then created an animation based on the converted sounds, an astonishing and odd and mesmerizing animation. Watch:

How wild is that? It reminds me of the movie "Forbidden Planet". The vibrating patterns are wonderful, and while I’m not sure how much scientific insight can be gained from them, the aesthetics are riveting. And I can hope ...

Science Getaways

Phil Plait — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:00:53 +0000

I am very pleased to announce the grand opening of Science Getaways, where you can take a vacation with your brain!

Science Getaways is a new travel company, started by my wife Marcella and me, for science enthusiasts who want to do more than just take a vacation: they want to feed their brain, too. Over the years I’ve been to a lot of cool places, but I’ve always found my experience is enhanced a lot by learning about the science of the region: the geology, the biology, the connection to other sciences. Heck, when we visited the Galapagos Islands a few years back the whole thing was nothing but science — and it was the vacation of a lifetime (as you can read here, and here, and here). Trips like this are becoming popular enough to get written up by the New York Times.

So we decided we wanted to do this too. Voila! Science Getaways, where we do all the work for you: find cool places to take ...

Dr. Sith’s The Grinch Who Stole Christmas

Phil Plait — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 14:00:26 +0000

In retrospect, the story similarities seem obvious.

Via Neatorama on G+

Thanksgiving wish

Phil Plait — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 20:49:37 +0000

I put this up on Google+ and Twitter, so what the heck.

My Thanksgiving wish to everyone:

Courtesy of Hyperbole and a Half and my own superior and fearsome Photoshop skillz.

Mister Terrific gets it right

Phil Plait — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 16:02:22 +0000

I get mail. Some good, some bad, some cryptic. In the past few days I’ve gotten some of the latter; people telling me I should take a look at the new DC Comics reboot of "Mister Terrific", a super-genius superhero who uses science and intellect to defeat the forces of evil.

The thing is, nobody would tell me why. OK, I figured, I’ll check it out when I get a chance.

Then I got another email, this time from my pal Eric Wallace, who writes for the TV show "Eureka". And who, it so happens, writes "Mister Terrific"! He asked me if I’d like to get a copy of the first couple of issues, and not being a complete idiot, I said yes.

I got them in the mail the other day, and sat down to read them. By the time I got to the end of the first issue, all the cryptic notes became clear to me. It’s because of this panel, where Michael Holt (aka Mister Terrific) is holding a fund raiser for a politician:

Ha! Perfect!

And does it sound familiar? It should. Unfortunately, this exact scene ...

Mine goes to 11 11 11

Phil Plait — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 08:11:44 +0000

Geeks across teh intertubez are giddy with delight today. Why? Because it’s November 11, 2011, of course! And if you’re in the US, you’d write this as 11/11/11, so of course this tickles the heart of any true mathematically-inclined nerd such as me. now, in the US we put the month first — MM/DD/YY — which is somewhat silly; in England and other realms they write it more logically with the units getting bigger left-to-right, so for them it’s DD/MM/YY, or, contrary to us yanks, 11/11/11.

OK, so anyway, it’s all ones. Why is that cool?

Well, it just is. Duh. But deep down, this goes to the root ("root"! HAHA! Oh man, I’m a math riot) of how we count. And I am never one to miss a chance to lecture on nerdalicious topics, so stick with me for a bit.

The power of ten compels you!

On the web, which consists of 87% dorks (look it up!), this date is special because it looks binary. For those of you unfamiliar with this, we humans tend to use the number ten as the basis of our counting. Our numbers reflect this: we break things down into powers ...

A new SMBC book! Plus, bonus me.

Phil Plait — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:57:02 +0000

Perhaps the single greatest feeling in the world — better than winning the lottery, better than seeing your baby being born, better than having fresh batteries in the TV remote — is waking up to find out you’re in the latest Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic. Click the panel here to read the whole thing.

Even better? There’s a new SMBC book! I haven’t read it yet, because Zach hasn’t sent me a free copy in exchange for relentlessly shilling his stuff here on the blog, but I assume it’s at least mildly diverting. Look, SMBC is the funniest science-based web comic done by a geeky ginger who also draws himself shirtless all the time, which, let’s face it, is a niche that’s nearly saturated (assuming Rupert Grint doesn’t start one as well).

His first book, "Save Yourself, Mammal!" is really funny, and this new one is a collection of comics hand-picked by Zach, so it’ll be the best thing you’ve ever read, or Zach will send you a dozen long-stem ...

NanoWeen Stories

Phil Plait — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:07:54 +0000

I used to dabble in writing fiction when I was younger, and really enjoyed it. I’ve had some interesting ideas filed away for years now, and then, in 2009, Wil Wheaton wrote about a site called Ficly, which inspired me to cold-start my fiction chops. Ficly only allows you to write micro-stories, with a total of 1024 characters (that is, letters, numbers, and punctuation; not story characters). That limit of only a few hundred words can really hone your skills! I had a lot of fun writing a couple of stories on Ficly called Deep, and Random Walk (the second of which is good for Halloween, though they’re both on the eerie side).

This morning, I was reading Twitter and suddenly wondered if it were possible to write even shorter stories. Twitter stories! They would have to be very short — duh — but still imply some story behind them. And this being Halloween, they had to be creepy. So I wrote one, gave it the hashtag #NanoWeenStories, and posted it:

I know, it’s a bit silly and tongue-in-cheek. But after posting it, ...

Out of this world jack-o-lantern

Phil Plait — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 18:30:37 +0000
Click here to view gallery

Great Tyson’s ghost!

Phil Plait — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:10:53 +0000

If you’re looking for some spooky listening for your Halloween, then aim your ectoplasmic resonator at astronomer Neil Tyson’s Star Talk radio show, because last night he hunted ghosts… or at least, talked to some folks who know about ghosts. He chats with author Mary Roach, skeptic ghost investigator Joe Nickell, and… me!

Yeah, I’m not really an expert on ghosts — still being alive and all — but I’ve seen a few ghost movies in my time, so we chat about those, and why I don’t personally think dead people are floating around, knocking on walls and hoping some "ghost hunter" will notice us and anxiously whisper, "Did you hear that?"

As always, talking with Neil is a lot of fun, and you’ll enjoy the whole show. You can also download the MP3 directly, too. [UPDATE: you can subscribe to Star Talk using iTunes, as well!]

My interview is broken up into several segments; the first starts around 11:30, the second at 24:50, the third at 36:15, and the fourth at 41:00. But of course you should listen to the whole show; it’s pretty ...

Just cos

Phil Plait — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 18:00:37 +0000

Some people might consider this a sin, but hey: I’m no angle.

This comic is from Luke Surl, who has some pretty funny geek comics on his site.

… and if you don’t get it, this might help. Or you could try searching on it; secant you shall find.

Tip o’ the sunscreen lid to Neil Tyson, whom I hear is really into astronomy.

Psychics leave me in shambles

Phil Plait — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:00:05 +0000

You know what really eats me up? People who claim they can talk to the dead, when it is far, far more likely they are simply using psychological tricks (like cold reading) and random guesses, making it seem like they have some supernatural power.

A while back, the James Randi Educational Foundation publicly challenged so-called "psychic" James van Praagh to take their Million Dollar Challenge and prove he can do what he claims. It’s been weeks, and he hasn’t replied. I can’t imagine why, can you? It’s almost as if he’s afraid of being tested in a controlled environment.

The JREF decided to follow up on their challenge to van Praagh, to see if they could make sure he got the message. And this time, they brought some friends…

Man, I would’ve given an arm and a leg to be there for that. But c’mon, do you really think van Praagh will ever respond?

Gnaw.

Related posts:

- Cold guessing
- D.J. Grothe: skepticism and humanism
- A: Ghouls. Q: What do you call psychic mediums?
- Blastr: I was a zombie for science

Bad Astronomy review: Terra Nova

Phil Plait — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 12:30:45 +0000

So I finally watched the pilot episodes of the new Fox scifi drama "Terra Nova" (it airs Mondays at 8:00 p.m. ET). I found it watchable, with some potential, and like every other TV show in existence (except "Firefly") it had some things I liked and some I didn’t. I got email about it due to a couple of lines in the pilot, which I’ll get to in a sec. First, a quick overview.

Gotta get back in time

The idea behind the show (no real spoilers here, since this is all explained in the first minute of the program) is that by the year 2149, the Earth is dying. Pollution, global warming, and so on have made the planet nearly uninhabitable. People need rebreathers just to go outside, and many scenes show huge chimneys pumping smoke into the air just to hammer home that point. Population control is mandatory; having more than two kids is an invitation for the police to come.

The show centers on a family – cop father, brilliant doctor mother, rebellious teenage son, science whiz-kid teenage daughter, and their youngest, a girl. And ...

Sunsquatch

Phil Plait — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 17:00:04 +0000

I love the images of the Sun taken by astrophotographer Alan Friedman. I love pareidolia. And I love cryptozoology.

So of course I love love love this:

[Click to sasquatchenate.]

Pareidolia is the trait of seeing recognizable objects in random patterns (usually, but not always, faces). Cryptozoology is the study of fabled creatures like Nessie, or the chupracabra, or… I don’t know, for a totally random example, let’s say Bigfoot.

Still not sure what I mean? Maybe this’ll help:

Ha!

OK, I’ll be a pedantic dork for just a sec, and say that this is actually just a prominence, an eruption of ionized gas off the surface of the Sun, guided by the twisting and churning solar magnetic field. Prominences can take all sorts of shapes — even angels and dragons — as they launch upward and fall back down to the Sun’s surface.

Alan Apeman — urp, sorry, I mean Friedman — takes simply amazing pictures of the Sun which I feature here all the time; see ...

Bad Astronomy » Geekery

SOPA and PIPA

Nerdist + Boulder + … me!

I am the Piano Doctor Man

The odds of successfully surviving an attack on an Imperial Star Destroyer are approximately…

Another orbit? Why, you don’t look a rotation older than 4.56 billion years!

Nothing to do

Blastr: Invasion Earth!

Laying down the pulsar beat

Geek holiday gift ideas: Robot roll call!

Naked I astronomy

Schrödinger’s Caturday

Mesmerizing visualization of a geomagnetic storm

Science Getaways

Dr. Sith’s The Grinch Who Stole Christmas

Thanksgiving wish

Mister Terrific gets it right

Mine goes to 11 11 11

A new SMBC book! Plus, bonus me.

NanoWeen Stories

Out of this world jack-o-lantern

Great Tyson’s ghost!

Just cos

Psychics leave me in shambles

Bad Astronomy review: Terra Nova

Sunsquatch